The Enlightenment and Original Sin

FAIN: FT-61838-14

Matthew Kadane
Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY 14456-3301)

This project aims to unravel the process by which an ordinary person in the eighteenth century came to embrace the culture of the Enlightenment. It centers on the life of Pentecost Barker (1690-1762), a previously unknown ship's purser from Plymouth who began as a traditional religious Dissenter and ended as a radical Unitarian. His change owed, I argue, to a complicated mix of economic ambition, intellectual and spiritual curiosity, imperial encounters, and, not least, the pressures put on his traditional religiosity by his heavy drinking, itself a consequence of the sociability required to win credit for his business and class ambitions. His life, made accessible by a large diary and hundreds of letters, can also be read as culturally symptomatic of the generally complex process by which Britons abandoned tradition, embraced modernity, and then fought (for Barker in a famous and unsuccessful court case) to convince others of the merits of their new outlook.

Media Coverage

We are not all guilty Denial of original sin united friends of the Enlightenment (Review)
Author(s): Arnold Hunt
Publication: Times Literary Supplement
Date: 10/11/2024
Abstract: Book review
URL: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/history/early-modern-history/the-enlightenment-and-original-sin-by-matthew-kadane-book-review-arnold-hunt

Associated Products

Original Sin and the Path to the Enlightenment (Article)
Title: Original Sin and the Path to the Enlightenment
Author: Matthew Kadane
Abstract: This article focuses on the unexamined and previously unknown life of Pentecost Barker (1690-1762), a British ship’s purser and wine merchant, to try, in the first instance, to explain his transition from the Puritan outlook detailed in his spiritual diary to the Enlightenment outlook detailed in a long correspondence with a unitarian minister. The motives for Barker’s change were intermingled, having as much to do with emotion, economics, drinking, and empire as with the criterion of reasonableness. The key moment of his transition, however, is conceptually more straightforward. It was his rejection of the doctrine of original sin. And in this sense Barker points to something much larger: a doctrinal shift that stands at the threshold between confessional and Enlightenment Europe. The article therefore blends social and intellectual history to try both to contextualize this watershed moment and to contribute to our understanding of why ordinary people, in particular, abandoned what to them counted as tradition and embraced the values that we now associate with Enlightenment culture.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/235/1/105/3787664?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Past and Present
Publisher: Oxford University Press

The Enlightenment and Original Sin (Book)
Title: The Enlightenment and Original Sin
Author: Matthew Kadane
Abstract: What was the Enlightenment? This question has been endlessly debated. In The Enlightenment and Original Sin, historian Matthew Kadane advances the bold claim that the Enlightenment is best defined through what it set out to accomplish, which was nothing short of rethinking the meaning of human nature. Kadane argues that this project centered around the doctrine of original sin and, ultimately, its rejection, signaling the radical notion that an inherently flawed nature can be overcome by human means. Kadane explores this and other wide-ranging themes through the story of a previously unknown figure, Pentecost Barker, an eighteenth-century purser and wine merchant. By examining Barker’s personal diary and extensive correspondence with a Unitarian minister, Kadane tracks the transformation of Barker’s consciousness from a Puritan to an Enlightenment outlook, revealing through one man’s journey the large-scale shifts in self-understanding whose philosophical reverberations have shaped debates on human nature for centuries.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo213458576.html
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226832890
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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